President Barack Obama extended a fiscal olive branch to Republicans on Wednesday. Then he beat them up with it.

Obama’s long-anticipated speech on the deficit at George Washington University was one of the oddest rhetorical hybrids of his presidency — a serious stab at reforming entitlements cloaked in a 2012 campaign speech that was one of the most overtly partisan broadsides he’s ever delivered from a podium with a presidential seal.

The centerpiece was a battle cry to his base, a call for $1 trillion in new taxes on the rich — on top of billions saved by allowing Bush-era tax cuts to lapse — in lieu of the deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and now identified with the GOP.

Liberals, for the most part, were assuaged. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said Obama’s call for $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years was “much better than many of us feared.” His conclusion:“I can live with this.”

But the combative tenor of Obama’s remarks, which included a swipe at his potential 2012 GOP challengers, may have scuttled the stated purpose of the entire enterprise — to start negotiations with Republicans on a workable bipartisan approach to attacking the deficit.

“This was not a speech designed for America to win the future; this was a speech designed for the president to attempt to win reelection,” snarled Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, No. 4 in House Republican leadership.

“More promises, hollow targets, and Washington commissions simply won’t get the job done,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama’s partner in the compromise deal on the 2011 budget that averted a government shutdown over the weekend.

Despite GOP criticism, Obama has proposed a brisk schedule for negotiations: Starting next month, he plans to convene a series of meetings with congressional leaders — mediated by Vice President Joe Biden — in hopes of drafting what aides described as a “framework” or “down payment” on entitlement reform by the end of June.

White House officials maintain that some kind of deal is achievable, if for no other reason than Republicans, who have attacked Obama for punting on the issue, will be forced to negotiate in good faith or lose credibility.

“They are in a box,” said an Obama ally.

“The president is optimistic we can get something done,” Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, told POLITICO.

The sense in the West Wing is that cooler heads in the Senate — eager to forge a deal to attack the country’s debt ahead of next year’s elections — will agree to some kind of revenue enhancements, forcing House Republicans to follow suit.

But if Obama’s goal was compromise, he pursued it with uncompromising language, saving his harshest words for Ryan, who last week unveiled a plan to privatize Medicare and cut a third of funding for Medicaid health care services for the poor.

“Let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society,” Obama said.

“I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.”

Ryan, who absorbed the drubbing while listening to Obama’s speech in the front row of the GW auditorium, wasn’t amused or in the mood to play Let’s Make A Deal.

“This is not even a plan; this was a speech,” he said.

“This was a plan to have a bunch of other people set up a commission to come up with a plan,” he added. “And then to hit spending and deficit targets that are even less ambitious than the last plan he came up with to have a commission to come up with a plan. So this wasn’t a plan; this was punting. He punted in his budget; he is now punting into a new commission to come up with smaller savings targets than what he came up with his last commission.”

Republicans pronounced any tax hike dead on arrival. And Obama — none too eager to walk the tax plank alone ahead of a reelection year — intentionally left the details blank.

That left Democrats less than sanguine about the prospects for any deal anytime soon. Republicans, meanwhile, feel out of the loop, a point underscored when virtually no one on the GOP side got a heads-up that Obama planned to move ahead with Wednesday’s speech until senior adviser David Plouffe announced it on the Sunday political talk shows.

“I have had no conversations with him and nor has the group,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), a member of the Gang of Six, a group of three Senate Republicans and three Senate Democrats who are writing their own deficit-reduction proposal.

Still, some are optimistic that with the president’s decision to get more forcefully involved in the debt issue, there could be a way to craft a bipartisan compromise — and some hope that could happen as part of an agreement to raise the $14.3 trillion national debt limit, which the Treasury Department has warned must occur within the next few months.

But Republican leaders in the Senate are in no mood to compromise with Democrats on the debt limit vote and are urging their members not to filibuster so Democrats are forced to find 51 votes from their own caucus.

Any filibuster, the GOP leaders fear, would result in as many as seven Republicans switching sides to support extending the limit — and give Obama the bipartisan victory he covets.

If anything, the lines that have divided the parties in the recent budget dispute will most likely harden in the coming months, with a presidential campaign about to begin and neither party eager to give an inch of ground politically.

“We’re so mired down in the mud that we cannot see the big issues,” Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) said in an interview last week. ”I don’t know if we’ll get to the big, slam-dunk stuff.”

“The window of opportunity probably at some point starts to close,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate. “The one thing that always strikes me about this place: If there’s a sense of urgency, if there’s something out there that’s compelling enough, you can get things done here. You can get them done in a fairly timely way.”

That’s not been the case this year.

Through April 5, the Senate had held just 50 votes — the lowest number of votes during a similar period in 14 years — and one of the lowest in the last quarter-century.

Aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) complain that GOP senators have held things up with unreasonable demands; Republicans, in turn, blame Reid for blocking action on the floor.

Even the Gang of Six — the bipartisan group most invested in reaching a budget compromise — seemed perturbed with Obama, who they seemed to thing is big-footing their months of delicate negotiations.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), one of the six, chafed at Obama’s suggestion that Biden begin regular meetings in May — with the hope of reaching a final agreement by the end of June.

“If that’s what he does, fine, but we’re going to continue to work in our group of six,” Chambliss said icily.

Asked if the Biden-led group would undermine the Gang of Six, Chambliss said Wednesday: “Anybody who has good ideas is welcome to give them to us.”

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — a close Obama ally who is one of the group, put out a terse statement shortly after Obama’s speech, suggesting that the group’s talks would still move ahead.

“Our bipartisan group of six senators continues to work for a comprehensive solution to our nation’s debt,” Durbin said.